Radiology is a complex process involving several interacting medical professionals. In a typical sequence, a patient's physician orders a radiology examination. A radiology technician operates the imaging system, such as a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) system, a computed tomography (CT) imaging system, a positron emission tomography (PET) imaging system, or so forth, or a combination of imaging system (e.g. PET/CT) to acquire images of an anatomical region of the patient in accordance with the physician's order. These images are stored in a Picture Archiving and Communication System (PACS), and are later viewed, or “read”, by a radiologist, typically using a dedicated radiology workstation executing a radiology reading environment. The main deliverable of the radiology reading is a radiology report, which is generally a narrative document divided in several sections that detail, respectively, the patient's clinical history, the main image findings and conclusions. Workflow may be made more efficient through the use of improvements such as speech recognition for dictating the radiology report, and through the use of standardized reporting templates such as RSNA templates in conjunction with standardized vocabulary.
Radiology reading is a complex task, whose results can be critical to providing a timely and accurate medical diagnosis and consequent treatment regimen. Various support tools are available for assisting the radiologist, such as medical literature, patient data available in the Electronic Medical Record (EMR), treatment guidelines for various conditions, computer-aided diagnostic (CADx) systems, and past radiology examinations of the patient which may be available in the PACS. These tools are typically implemented as third party resources that are separate from the radiology reading environment, although they usually can be accessed at the radiologist's initiative from the radiology workstation via the hospital electronic data network.
Radiological imaging is used in the diagnosis and assessment of a wide range of medical conditions ranging from relatively simple bone fractures to complex oncology staging and tumor grading tasks. In many medical institutions, radiology is a high throughput department in which the radiologist is expected to perform many reading tasks per work shift. For example, a typical radiology department may expect the radiologist to perform an x-ray or ultrasound reading in a time frame of two minutes or less, while a more complex reading task such as a multi-slice CT or MRI may be expected to be performed in about five to seven minutes. Under these time constraints, the radiologist may find it difficult to recognize and make use of available tools such as the EMR, past radiology examinations stored in the PACS, and various CADx or electronic treatment guideline resources. Operating under tight time constraints also increases the possibility that the radiologist may fail to provide sufficient support for a radiology finding in the written radiology report, or may fail to make and record appropriate secondary findings.
Improvements disclosed herein address the foregoing and other disadvantages of existing radiology reading systems, methods, and the like.